I do not know where you are from, but I am sorry if popularity of figure skating is declining / you are worried that it may decline in your part of the world. I am lucky perhaps the sport is enjoying almost unprecedented popularity where I come from, Japan. (Though it is not where I live now, so I sympathise. )

I think its popularity in Japan is little to do with the rules and /or which aspect of figure skating the rules place emphasis upon. It's simply because Japanese competitive skaters have been very successful in the recent years. It was once very popular, when Midori Ito was successful, then popularity declined until 2006; when Shizuka won the OGM, it just exploded. The rules changed and figure skating changed quite a bit between the late 1980s / early '90s when Midori was skating and 2006. So I understand it is not to do with the sport itself, but success that counts.

I cannot think of a single sport which enjoys universal popularity, even though it is played under the same rules. It depends on the number of participants, history, whether it is included in the school's PE curriculum (=familiarity), and mostly their national team's international success.

I appreciate your love of the sport, and understand your frustration over the rules that have changed worse for you. But I am not going to argue that point, as it is personal to you. It is enjoyable to share personal views and preferences, but I do not gain much from arguing about it. Besides, what you enjoy in figure skating is very similar to mine!

Back to Michal - I do hope he and Tomas are going to be very successful this season, and many more seasons to come. Then popularity of male figure skating will rise in Czech Republic. That'll be only a good thing.

So, basically, the objective state of the sport of figure skating doesn't matter. What matters is that it's popular in Japan/Korea because people there are excited by "their own kind" doing well in competitions. I can't abide by that notion as a reason for why I shouldn't debate about the poor judging system. ALL countries would benefit from better rules. I rather think that real fans of skating in Japan would be excited to see Mao and Takahashi skate with greater artistic freedom in competitions.

Nope, the judges don't really care that much about good edges in the footwork. First of all, it's not a requirement for gaining levels. You just need to have the right amount of steps, turns, quick rotation, and full body movement. Secondly, judges do indeed score the footwork in GOE based upon, basically, how "exciting" they find it to be. If they really cared about strong, deep edges then we wouldn't have seen some of the scores for certain competitors that we have on these elements.

It's been a while since you wrote this but

Originally Posted by Blades of Passion

The bullet points for GOE on the technical elements need to be reworked. Most specifically, footwork should have a REQUIRED bullet point of "adheres to a Circular, Straight, or Serpentine pattern". Jumps should have more emphasis on height and distance (those together are 1 single bullet point right now, which is stupid, because you could theoretically get +3 GOE for a tiny jump). Oh, and multi-direction spins should receive more credit as well since they finally disallowed simple upright multi-direction spins as counting for a feature.

The step sequences are all over the place now. I see a lot of moving, arm-flailing, tiny twists on ice, but it all seems like busywork. I used to watch an athlete's skates during step sequences. Now, well, I keep my eyes on the upper body, which is where the movement is centered. The only exceptions are Patrick and Kozuka.